The Gorgon Festival (23 page)

“Come back, Little Papa.”

Well, inconstancy was the better part of romance, Ward thought, leaping into the saddle, but to two things men were constant ever.

He gunned the BMW 280 from behind the washroom and throttled down, describing a series of slow figure-eights below the margin of the trees. Watching, he saw the Patriots detaching themselves unhurriedly from the crowd, and he knew the patterns he wove with his motorcycle had slowed their haste. Prior research done unobtrusively along the Sunset Strip had explained the patterns. His figure-eights were a challenge to a game of hare and hounds.

Conventions of the contest were rigid. The chase did not begin until the leader of the hounds dropped his arm, and wherever the hare led, the hounds must follow on pain of being branded “chicken.”

Twenty yards below Ward, the Patriots sauntered toward their machines. Farther below, two lines of shepherdesses wound unnoticed along gravel paths, tossing poppies to a crowd that had turned to look up the slope. Farthest below, the tiny figure of Diana bent over her piano, oblivious to all save her schedule and the metronome beating in her head.

“He’p me with my ballast, Arms,” Papa called.

Arms came and the two men lifted Little Mama, limp from speed and satiety, to the rear seat of the Schweinjaeger and strapped her where she lolled, dream-lost and smiling.

All Patriots stood beside their hogs, now, facing toward Ward as they pulled on goggles and gauntlets and cinched the straps of their crash helmets. They faced Ward but did not look at him, in a dismissal both contemptuous and Calvinistic, as if his fate were settled, preordained, and no power of the law or social agencies could prevent or even delay the inevitable crotch job.

“Patriots, start your engines!” Big Papa’s order rolled down the line and the sound of motors shivered the now purple haze over the meadow.

Big Papa’s arm was raised as he glanced down the line and Ward, on the downslope of the segment of a circle, was watching the arm. Ward timed his start perfectly. As he swung into an upslope segment of his weave, looking over his shoulder he saw the arm drop.

The chase was on.

As if scorning suicide Ward gunned his BMW 280 straight toward the trees, splitting a distance between two eucalyptuses so narrow that scales from both trunks were brushed away by his Levis. Swerving among the boles, dipping below projections, along a course he had rehearsed for weeks, he cleared tiny gullies over concealed embankments and arched over protruding roots on inconspicuous stone bridges. Leaves shook from the sound of his passing, but the roar behind him diminished.

Angling into the approach road on the bight of its southward bend, he gunned toward the ranch house at ninety, slowing as he neared the parking area and skewing to a halt where the footpath to Lover’s Leap commenced.

Ostensibly as a gesture of contempt, Ward, who hadn’t smoked since the Surgeon General’s Report, paused and lit a cigarette as he waited for the hounds to clear the trees.

Big Papa’s powerful and ballasted Schweinjaeger broke first from the grove, its driver looking right and left until he spotted prey up the slope.

“Rabbit, one o’clock high!” he yelled as other Patriots emerged onto the road.

Ward took a deep draw from his cigarette, touched it to the fuze on his gas tank, and flipped it downhill as he straddle-walked his vehicle onto the hikers’ trail and started in “low.”

The hounds, plus bitch, could not head him off at the pass because the field between was clustered with boulders and dense with chaparral. They had to follow him.

Ward drove slowly along the winding gravel lane. Behind, he heard Big Papa cut in his supercharger and he knew the entire pack had cleared the woods. He glanced back and saw them hit the gravel at a full seventy, driving with superb skill, as he, using the broken-wing technique of a quail, pretended to pick his way along the lane.

Keeping an eye on them in his rear view mirror, he drove with one hand, loosening the cap on his gas tank and losing another twenty yards in the maneuver. When the leader was a mere thirty yards behind, Ward, in apparent panic, gunned his vehicle forward and hit the banking turn into the feeder ravine at fifty. Out of sight, he coasted, braking to forty for the curving run to the precipice. This speed for this curve at this banking angle had been calculated beforehand. Balancing his machine, he prepared for the trick he could not rehearse.

He hit the straightaway and threw his feet to the handlebars, guiding with his heels and balancing atop the seat. Ahead, eight feet from the ledge, the truck tire dangled from the knob of the overhanging limb and the opening in the tire seemed no larger than a pinhole as he aimed his right forearm at the aperture and the motorcycle hurtled toward the precipice.

Braced for an arm-wrenching tug, a shoulder separation, or even death in a possible fall, he jabbed his right arm through the tire and clamped his left hand around his wrist. The rope had slack enough to permit him to run straight before swinging into the arc of the rope and the tire’s resilience absorbed the shock.

Ward rode his Molotov cocktail over the precipice, but as the machine dropped to the canyon floor to splatter into a mounting ring of fire he was making a lazy half-circle in the sky. On the far side of the oak knoll, he landed on his prepared spot with less shock than he remembered as a parachutist at the Arnheim Drop.

Holding his tire in the crook of his arm, he watched the mouth of the feeder ravine.

Whoosh!

Big Papa came first. His shaft-driven Schweinjaeger shot from the ledge to plummet into the chasm, Little Mama clinging behind. Her platinum hair, flying from under Ward’s azure helmet, reminded him of the wings of a butterfly, fluttering high. Before Big Papa whomped into the brush and rocks below, Arms and Brazos, following, were airborne above their maximum leader. Then in order they came: the Barber, Breeches, Crotch Job, Drain Oil, Lefty, the Loon, Muffler, the Owl, Razor, Sprocket, No Balls, and an unidentified fellow traveler on a green Triumph.

Some fell with receding screams of terror terminated by the crunch of crushed metal, but the last crunch did not end in silence.

From forty feet above, Ward heard the
harrooom
of runaway motors, the wham and whoosh of exploding gasoline tanks, an occasional scream from a reviving survivor, and the crackle of burning brush. He marveled at the adaptability of nature. Chaparral was a scrub conditioned by fire; it burned quickly and it was germinated by flames which broke open its seed pods.

With the additional gasoline spraying the canyon walls, Ward doubted if he would have to use his conventional Molotov cocktail cached earlier, until he noticed that the rotundity of Arms had let his body roll down the canyon, clear of the flames which were mounting the draw. Arms sat looking groggily at a broken forearm dangling from the elbow he held before him. If Arms revived enough in time to act, he could escape down the canyon.

Ward rolled the T-shirt, inserted it into the bottle, let it saturate, lighted it, and hurled the lire bomb. Smoke from its wick scrawled a crude series of O’s through the air, such as those from a child’s penmanship exercise, as the bottle arced down the ravine to explode ten yards below the befuddled Arms and ensure him an invitation to the Patriots’ barbecue.

Looking down on the holocaust, Ward realized the scene would appear gruesome to anyone, other than a Vietnam veteran, who lacked scientific objectivity, but Ward was a veteran of the Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen generation and this was merely a warm-up for another scene he was dreading to watch.

Because he was a war veteran and a scientist Ward was almost shocked by an improbability.

As the growl of motors diminished under the crackle of flames, a figure emerged from the pit, climbing hand over hand and dragging a maimed leg behind, grasping at shrubbery, roots, projecting rocks, finding handholds where none should have been. Incredibly, the man was keeping ahead of the fire line. As he climbed upward, Ward recognized behind the dirt and blood the face of the Barber, whose arms apparently held superhuman strength as well as artistry. Even granting that the fire gave him extra impetus, Ward felt the struggle was a tribute to the young man’s survival instinct. The Barber was a sadist, but he was tough.

As he climbed nearer, Ward heard him crying, “Hellup, hellup,” with a hoarse yelping quality to his voice which gave Ward pause until he identified the correlative sound—the barking of a seal.

Ward had provided for such a contingency. He hoisted the boulder he had placed under the oak—it was almost as large and fully as round as the Tom Watson watermelons grown on his father’s farm—and set it nearer the edge of the precipice. For a moment he studied the lie of the boulder. The Barber was climbing fifteen yards beneath an overhang which obstructed the roll, but there was another obstruction to the right and below the overhang protecting the climber.

Ward moved the boulder approximately fourteen centimeters to the right of its original location and waited a moment for the Barber’s climb to bring him to an invisible X Ward drew on the cliff face. Then he shoved the boulder off the ledge.

As he had calculated, the granite ball caromed off the right ledge and dropped toward the Barber. The Barber’s mouth was open to bellow “Help” when the boulder scored a perfect strike on his head, strangling the cry with his teeth and collapsing jawbone. Probably his mandible was driven into his tonsils, but the force of the blow became an academic consideration when the Barber fell backward to join his fellow members of the Orange County Patriots’ Motorcycle Club and Self-immolation Society.

Ward stood for a moment brushing the dirt off his hands and studying the flames. Confined as it was within the walls of the ravine, the fire could have been extinguished at the moment by a single borate bomber, but it would be an hour before such measure could be taken.

Ordinarily, Ward detested the fad words of the intelligentsia. Next to “dialogue,” used without reference to the dramatic arts, he disliked the current vogue for “eschatology,” used outside church ritual. Looking down, he felt no regret for the mass suicides; rather, a satisfying awareness of final things, the emotions of eschatology in their true sense.

Not one of those boys could have made it alone in a competitive economy; they simply were not Establishment material. The only immediate meaning their deaths held for society would not be apparent until the winter rains came to the re-seeded watershed. Above their charred calcium, the tufts of rye grass might grow a little greener.

Ecologically, Ward felt an abiding sense of accomplishment. Weighed non-contemporaneously, these deaths would benefit all successive generations. A source of pollution had been removed from the flow of evolution.

Remembering a line from Euripides, Ward quoted it aloud as a requiescat for the Patriots, “Of strong things find you not any as strong as the strings of fate.”

Those below had eaten of the lotus of violence and each had been foredoomed by his short time-horizon. They had lived on the perilous edge and had dropped over the edge, together. Once each had had a separate rendezvous with death, at midnight on some flaming mattress, at some highway patrol’s disputed barricade; a few would have ended as greasy periods below exclamation points drawn on concrete in burnt rubber. Now Ward, their
deus ex machismo
, had twisted the strings of their fate into a single knot of brotherhood eternal.

Standing there, where the mountains look on Malibu and Malibu looks on the sea, he felt, finally, the catharsis of a Prometheus, chthonian yet Olympian, who had stolen from the gods not the gift of fire but of death. His dialogue with this segment of the young was complete. They had learned by example always to do unto others before it was done unto them.

Now, to the festival and the continuing dialogue.

Ward took off his shirt, weighted it with his boots, and hurled the evidence that connected him with the Patriots onto the pyre. He hated to lose the shirt, an eighty-dollar item, but the boots were ruined. If he wore them around Palo Alto, every cat in the neighborhood would be trailing behind him.

In barefeet and T-shirt, Ward jogged back to the ranch house. In the twenty-five minutes before Gollenberger and Stein were to play he had to dress and make three anonymous calls to report his location to the LAPD, the FBI, and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. To be fair and to create jurisdictional confusion, he wanted all departments on the scene with Joe Cabroni as a witness who could recognize Ruth Gordon. Now, as a civic duty, he would also have to report the fire, before he ripped the veil from the face of Medusa and revealed her attendant Gorgons.

When Ward reached the eucalyptus grove on his return to the meadow, he knew Diana had established the competitive factor in her experiment beyond doubt.

Drifting up through the trees, hollow-eyed from shock, dazed, some weeping, a horde of young people were making their way toward the parking lot. Ward had seen such expressions among civilian evacuees of war-shattered towns in Europe, and as of old he cloaked his mind with a soldier’s apathy. But his cloak was tattered from long disuse and it took an effort of will to count a random sample of the émigrés, twenty girls and two boys. One of the boys was being drawn, almost forcibly, by a girl, possibly his older sister, so Ward was somewhat uncertain that his sampling was accurate.

They had a right to be shocked. They were the walking wounded from point zero of a biological nuclear explosion. He wanted to shout, “Forget it, girls. This bomb will be defuzed.”

But they would not forget. In her own continuing dialogue with the young, Diana had convinced them, with utter finality, they should never trust anyone, over or under thirty.

On the other hand, they would not talk, and the experiment would never reach the record books of science for other biologists to attempt.

To the final movement of Bach’s Passion, Ward emerged from the eucalyptus grove dressed in Establishment style. In the distance, Diana bent over her piano in a concentration touching on the sublime, because the intervening scene made Bach’s Passion resemble a Parcheesi game between two maiden aunts.